The Hindu Business Line : Style is the man!

It is a late cold winter evening in Lutyen’s New Delhi. On the lawns of the residence of the French Ambassador, Mr Jérôme Bonnafont, are diplomats, journalists and book lovers, kept warm by the rapid pace of cocktails. The gathering’s collective chatter comes to a sudden stop as silence falls together with darkness. Now, a vigorous jingling of a bell, resembling that of a rickshaw puller, is heard as one sees a tall figure silhouetted against the dark ness move across the stage.

Reincarnated rickshaw puller

As the podium is lit up with the return of lights, there appears the happy, beaming face of Dominique Lapierre, the celebrated author of The City of Joy. “This is the reincarnated Kolkata rickshaw puller,” cries the French writer, still jingling the bell. And the audience gives him a thunderous welcome. Of course, the bell symbolises Kolkata’s once ubiquitous rickshaw puller, the immortalised hero of The City of Joy. Lapierre at once touches a chord in everyone’s heart, his uncanny writer’s instinct feeling the pulse of the gathering.

Preparing for another launch

The style is the man! This is Lapierre’s way of preparing the audience for the launch of his yet another book Once Upon a Time in the Soviet Union, published By Full Circle, based on his travel in the USSR in 1956.

Dominique Lapierre, aged 25 and Jean-Pierre Pedrazzini, 27, two star reporters of the prestigious French News Magazine Paris Match, got from Nikita Khrushchev, the extraordinary authorisation to cross the Iron Curtain aboard their own automobile. They travelled 13,000 km on the Soviet roads. During the book launch, Lapierre, clearly his tongue in his cheek, narrated an incident to show how an average Soviet longed for freedom. During his Soviet journey, a villager asked the author to flatten the tyre of his car. “Why?” a puzzled, Lapierre quizzed. “So I can breathe in the free air of Paris”! pat came the reply from the peasant.

What makes his writing sparkle? The 76-year-old Lapierre, still retaining youthful zest, gives an apparently simple tip to budding writers. “Mind the three ‘S’ — Sight, Sound and Smell,” the master story-teller says and asks, “Isn’t it writing all about describing what you see, hear and smell?” Can anyone disagree?

(The author, a former deputy editor with PTI, is a New Delhi-based freelance journalist. Feedback can be sent to rajamanirc@gmail.com)